Shamima Begum was smuggled into Syria for Islamic State by a Canadian spy whose role was covered up by security services, it has been claimed.
Ottawa is accused of withholding information about their whereabouts while the Metropolitan Police conducted an international search for them.
However, it is claimed that Canadian intelligence did not learn that Begum had been recruited until four days after she left Britain, when she had already crossed the border into Syria.
Begum was a 15-year-old girl when she and two classmates from Bethnal Green Academy traveled from east London to Syria in 2015.
She, along with her schoolmates Kadiza Sultana, 16, and Amira Abase, 15, were met at the bus station in Istanbul for their journey to a life with IS in Syria by a man named Mohammed Al Rashed.
The claim is made in Richard Kerbaj’s The Secret History of the Five Eyes, which is published on Thursday. Five Eyes is the intelligence sharing network between Britain, the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Rashed is said to have been a double agent who shared Begum’s passport details with Canada and smuggled dozens of others from Britain to fight for IS.
The lawyer for the Begum family, Tasnime Akunjee, argues that the teenager was treated outside the country. The suggestion that a Western intelligence asset may have been involved, including arranging bus tickets for the school, will reignite the debate over the withdrawal of his British citizenship.
The Met police are said to have been tipped off about the role of a Canadian double agent in smuggling the girls out of Britain.
In the book, Kerbaj writes that Canada’s intelligence service “remained silent on the explosive allegations, taking refuge in the one thing that protects all intelligence agencies, including those of the Five Eyes , against a possible shame: the secret”.
“For seven years, this has been covered up by the Canadians,” Kerbaj told the Guardian. He said he interviewed several Canadian intelligence officials for the book, who confirmed the chronology of events.
“I think the cover-up is worse than the offense in many ways here because human intelligence agencies are expected to recruit members of criminal groups and terrorist groups.”
Kerbaj said British authorities were also not forthcoming once they learned of Rashed’s role for Canada in recruiting the girls.
“I think they thought it best not to talk about it because there were still British and other Western hostages in Isis territory,” Kerbaj said.
“There was a concern that at the same time they were trying to access Isis and trying to infiltrate Isis, if a story like this came out that one of their own had been turned over there, was working for the Canadian services, then that would make them even more paranoid and would start beheading people.”
Last year, the Supreme Court upheld a 2019 decision to prevent the now 23-year-old from returning to the UK. Begum lives in a detention camp in northern Syria, having given birth to three children, all of whom died young.
There was no suggestion in the supreme court judgment that the circumstances of his smuggling into Syria were known to the British authorities.
Begum is due to present a new case to the special board of immigration appeals in November.
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Akunjee said a key argument in the case would be that Sajid Javid, who was the UK home secretary at the time, did not consider her to be a victim of trafficking.
“The UK has international obligations in terms of how we see a person treated and what culpability they prescribe for their actions,” he told the BBC.
Akunjee said that as a Western intelligence asset, Rashed was “someone who is supposed to be an ally, protecting our people, rather than trafficking British children into a war zone”.
He added: “Intelligence-gathering on children’s lives appears to have been prioritized.”
In 2013, two years before the girls were taken to Syria, Rashed went to the Canadian embassy in Jordan to seek asylum, according to the book. He is also said to have claimed that Canada told him he could get citizenship if he collected information on IS activities.
It is written that he had taken photographs of the passports of those he smuggled into IS under the pretext of needing an ID to buy transport tickets. He then sent them to his Canadian Security Intelligence Service handler at the embassy in Jordan.
He was arrested in Şanlıurfa, Turkey, days after facilitating the girls’ trip. He is understood to have told law enforcement that the reason he had collected information on everyone he had helped was because he was sharing the information with the Canadian embassy in Jordan.
Speaking about Rashed, Begum told an upcoming BBC podcast: “He organized the whole trip from Turkey to Syria… I don’t think anyone would have been able to get to Syria without the help of the smugglers.
“He had helped a lot of people get in. … We were doing everything he told us because he knew everything, we knew nothing.”
A Canadian government spokesman did not comment on the allegations.
A UK government spokesman said: “It is our long-standing policy not to comment on operational intelligence or security matters.”